In the past, most wireless communication systems were primarily focused on providing voice services. More recently, with the evolution of various wireless technologies, the focus has shifted to providing other services, such as multimedia or data services, in addition to voice services. As an example, there is an increasing demand for multimedia applications and services, such as mobile internet, streaming audio/video, and other data and video services. To meet the bandwidth constraints posed by the various multimedia services, Multicast and Broadcast Services (MBS) or Multimedia Broadcast Multicast service (MBMS) have emerged as implementations that provide broadcasting services in current and future cellular networks.
Taking a system equipped with MBS capabilities as an example, a number of mobile terminals within a given geographical area (which can be named as an MBS zone) can share and utilize same radio resources, such as by having common frequency, time, codes, or other communication parameters such radio resource units. Because the same resources are shared, rather than divided, by multiple users, the data bandwidth can be increased to transfer large amounts of data in a short period of time.
Depending on the applications, one potential problem for MBS service is signal interferences at overlapping MBS zones. For example, a base station (BS) that is a member of or within two or more MBS zones may be subject to undesirable interference, such as transmission of different data over the same channel or sub-channel at the same time. However, on the other hand, if two zones do not overlap, it may be beneficial to allow two concurrent transmissions to exist for better resources utilization.
Therefore, it may be desirable to provide resource management that may manage radio resources for various MBS zones, some of which may be overlapping.